


A Little Night Music

by StarMaamMke



Series: Without You [2]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-30
Updated: 2017-09-30
Packaged: 2019-01-07 02:19:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12223734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarMaamMke/pseuds/StarMaamMke
Summary: Jim stumbles upon something of Joyce's at a police auction. Good thing she has a birthday coming up.





	A Little Night Music

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Reality_Bytes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Reality_Bytes/gifts).



The first time Joyce quit piano, she was ten years-old, and her Nana Bets had died of an aneurysm right in the middle of Beethoven's  _ " _ Moonlight Sonata" . Until the day she died, Joyce would always remember the way her knuckles stung from the raps she had taken for messing up  the arpeggios, and the sound Bets’s forehead made as it slammed against the the music rack, causing damage to the ancient Broadwood Upright that her great-grandmother had brought over on The Boat. The break had nothing to do with the natural trauma of watching her grandmother die suddenly while her father was at work; no, it had more to do with the fact that the piano had been passed down from Joyce’s mother’s side, and with said mother’s death coinciding with the girl’s first breath, and now with Bets dying too, there was no one in the home to force Joyce to keep up with lessons. 

 

Eventually, little Jimmy Hopper noticed that Joyce had a lot more free time for play after her grandmother’s death, and was thoughtful enough to ask about the fact. Joyce dragged the boy into her living room and waved in the direction of the piano, which was, at that point, gathering dust in one corner of the living room. 

 

“You don’t play anymore?” Jimmy asked, astonishment evident in his tone. 

 

“Bets was the only one who made me do it. Dad can barely plunk out ‘Chopsticks’,” Joyce announced as she crossed the room and opened the bench, pulling up a small stack of sheet music. She closed the bench, took a seat, and began to scrutinize the selections. 

“But you were really good, my mom even said so.” Jim’s mother had been town piano teacher before his younger sister was born. Joyce had never taken lessons from her, but the girl had been invited to play a few pieces when visiting the Hopper house. 

 

Joyce wrinkled her nose and shook her head as she lined the music rack with yellowing sheets. “Bets said I was mediocre, but that I could improve if only my fingers would grow and I’d stop being lazy.” She opened the fallboard, pushed it back and began to plunk out a few keys with both index fingers. 

 

“If mediocre means  _ that _ ,” Jimmy pointed toward Joyce’s tuneless actions, “then I guess she musta been right.”

 

Joyce turned her head to bestow a fierce glare in Jimmy’s direction. Without a word, she turned back and let her fingers dance across the keyboard. Jimmy didn’t know what she was playing at the time, but whatever it was, it was making his heart heavy with a melancholy he had never felt in his short, happy years. “What is it, Joycie?” he finally inquired once his throat stopped constricting oddly. 

 

“Chopping.”

 

“Sounds like ‘playing’. It’s beautiful.”

 

Joyce snorted, but did not pause from her playing. “You uncultured moron. That’s the name of the composer -  it’s his 20th nocturne.”

 

“I think you mean  _ Chopin _ … what’s ‘nocturne’ mean?”

 

“Sad forever.”

 

“Oh. I guess that explains it.”

A day later, Georgina Hopper was knocking on Bruce Calloway’s door with an offer:  She would come out of retirement to give Joyce lessons for 50 cents a week, two times per week. 

 

“What’s in it for me?” Bruce asked, his usually charming County Cork dialect thick and bitter with drink. 

 

“It's not for you, it's for your daughter, but if you want self-serving reasons; it will keep your daughter out of trouble-”

 

“Girl! What are you doing when I'm at work?” Bruce growled, pivoting from facing front door to the coffee table in front of the couch, where Joyce was busy half-listening, half-solving long division problems in a workbook. Her eyes went wide with fear and she was struck dumb by her father’s outburst.

 

“I asked you a -”

 

“Bruce, she hasn't done anything!” Georgina protested, stepping forward to grab his right arm in both hands, attempting to pull his attention away from Joyce. Bruce gave Joyce one more withering look before turning back to Georgina.

 

“I'm sorry if I upset you, I only meant hypothetically - what I meant to say was; Joyce is talented. I'm very sorry about your mother-in-law -” 

 

Bruce cut her off with a rude noise. “I'm not. Meddling old bitch…”

 

Georgina held up two, calming hands. “That’s fine. From what I understood from Jimmy, Betsey was the one who taught Joyce how to play, and now your wife's priceless piano has been gathering dust for nearly a year-”

 

“How priceless?” Bruce’s eyes held a curious glint, and his lips were pulled into a thoughtful smile.

 

“Well, it's an antique Broadwood…” Georgina sputtered.

 

“Maybe if it's just ‘gathering dust’, as you say, it might fetch a good price.” 

 

Joyce shot up. “Dad, no!”

 

“Bruce, please don’t even entertain that notion. You loved it when Moira used to play, and that piano is a part of Joyce’s history. I can't imagine a finer gift to your wife’s legacy if you allowed Joyce to train. She might become a concert pianist like her mother was before…”

 

“Before I got her in trouble, you were meaning to say?” Bruce inquired, his voice dangerously low. 

 

“I will give you 200 dollars to keep it. As an investment for Joyce’s future.”

 

Two days later, Joyce was sitting next to Georgina on the older woman’s piano bench in the Hopper’s drawing-room. They went over scales as Jimmy read a Hardy Boys book on the sofa. 

 

“You have good form and I can tell scales bore you. How about you show me what you’re made of?” Georgina teased sweetly before scooting off of the bench and crossing the room to sit at the sofa with her son. She plucked the book from Jimmy’s hands and nudged him in the side with her elbow. The boy looked up towards the piano, his cheeks going crimson as Joyce shot him a cheeky wink before turning her attention to the music in front of her. 

 

“Did your grandmother ever let you do waltzes?” Georgina inquired in a mildly curious tone as Joyce studied the notes in front of her.

 

“Too fanciful, she said. Bets liked the sad stuff.”

 

“And what do you like?”

 

Joyce shrugged without looking back. “I guess I never thought about it,” she replied before going into Shostakovich’s “Waltz. No. 2” with hesitant but earnest vigor.  

 

Joyce kept up with her playing throughout middle and high school under Georgina’s mentorship, and had local success as an accompanist for her church and her high school drama club. Georgina even managed to set Joyce up with a paying gig for the local community theater. It hadn’t been much, but none of the actors were compensated, so the experience was a point of pride for the seventeen year-old. Then there were the seemingly endless recitals, one of which gave Joyce the opportunity to play her beloved “Nocturne no. 20” with a violinist to accompany her. Nervous little Bob Newby played beautifully, but some eagle-eyed audience members (Jimmy “I’m Jim Now, Jimmy is a Baby Name” Hopper) complained that the round-faced boy glanced over at Joyce a little too often for their liking. Very unprofessional. 

 

Joyce never did quite reach her concert pianist goals, but she did meet Lonnie Byers. He had graduated from Hawkins High School when Joyce and Jim were Freshmen, and Joyce had never paid him much mind, except to regard him as a bit of a public nuisance. Around the middle of her Senior year, when her romance with Jim was beginning to chafe because of what she considered a rather hypocritical jealousy (He didn’t like her playing music with Bob Newby; she didn’t care for the way he stared at her sometimes friend, Chrissy), Lonnie started to less of a nuisance and more of an exciting older man. 

 

So, she married him. A few years later, she had Jonathan and a few years after that, when she was eight months pregnant, she waddled through the front door of the house she had inherited from her father to find her beloved Broadwood was absent from its cheery little space in the corner of her livingroom.

 

“Debts, Joycie, and you hardly play anymore. Now we can bring little Billy into the world with a clean slate.”

 

“Will. We’re shortening his name to Will, not Billy. Billy is a shitheel name,” Joyce replied numbly before grabbing Jonathan and taking him out for ice cream. The alternative was mariticide. 

 

Joyce had  _ just  _ managed to get Jonathan to sit still long enough for her to show him a few basic songs. It was mostly hand-over-hand, and silly things like “Mary Had a Little Lamb”, but the idea of passing her scrappy little Upright down to her oldest, along with the skill to play it, was beginning to appeal to her. She sensed something innate in the boy, a love of music that managed to light up his serious little face. His favorite song to hear her play was Eric Satie’s “Gnossienne No. 1”; he’d clap and giggle to the melancholy piece, a fact that never failed to amuse her. He was definitely her son, revelling in the beauty of the morose. 

 

That was the second time she quit playing piano. It had come on gradually, this time. After disassociating herself from the Hopper family, there had been less occasion to play for events, and Lonnie had insisted from day one that he would never, ever consider moving to New York so she could attend school, and besides, he doubted she was even good enough to make it past an audition, let alone several semesters. Joyce wanted to scoff at his pessimism, but she remembered her father screaming at her to ‘Hush that noise, goddamn it!’ countless times throughout the years, and Georgina had once said Bruce adored her mother’s playing, so maybe Lonnie was right. 

  
  


________

 

“Hey, Chief! What brings you here?” Calvin Powell inquired as his boss sat down next to him with a heavy sigh. 

 

“I don’t know. I’ve been meaning to replace my couch, auction seemed a good place to start.”

 

Powell wrinkled his nose in disgust. “It’s a Police Auction, you don’t wanna know where those couches have been.”

Jim shrugged. “Guess I had nothin’ better to do.”

 

The two chatted pleasantly until the auction began. After about four uninteresting lots were presented, Jim began to feel sleepy and bored. He leaned back in his uncomfortable metal chair and tipped his hat over his eyes, prepared to catch a few winks in the basement of the Salem Police Department, when the next lot was announced, and subsequently made him straighten in his seat.

 

“You perked up awful fast over some crappy old piano, Chief.”

 

“I knew someone with a Broadwood,” Jim mumbled as he squinted towards the front. Same color, same faded but intricate inlay, same… he leaned forward. There was a definite crack running down the middle of the music rack, and he was certain if he got a closer look, he’d be able to spot the miniscule bloodstain that Joyce’s grandmother had left on the rack after collapsing against it. The poor thing had suffered a lot of wear and tear since he last laid eyes on it - dents, scuff marks, rings from cold drinks rested... and what he was certain were cigarette burns, but it was Joyce’s piano. He could almost see her; slender form erect and at attention; auburn hair in a low chignon; elegant, tapered fingers hovering over the keys. Maybe she’d be playing “Clair de Lune” or “Danse Macabre” if she was feeling particularly dark. 

 

“Knew or know? You’ve got a funny look.” Powell was scrutinizing Jim with a wry expression on his face.

 

“She doesn’t have it anymore, but I think that one used to belong to her.” 

 

Powell tilted his head back and gave a soft chuckle. “Uh-huh. Well, maybe Joyce would appreciate the gesture, if you know what I mean.”

 

Jim frowned. “I’m not trying to score brownie points with Joyce Byers. She’s with Bob Newby now.”

 

“Then why, exactly, do you have that paddle raised?”

 

_________

 

“Happy birthday!” 

 

Joyce Byers reared back in shock, her hand covering her mouth, when the lights switched on in her living room and her boyfriend, sons, and several friends jumped up from various hiding places to shout cheerfully in her direction. 

 

“Oh jeez,” she murmured, her face bright red. She was grinning, nonetheless. 

 

Bob crossed the room to take her coat and purse, and to lead her to the couch. “Take a load off, Peanut. We'll bring the party to you.” 

 

Joyce shook her head and sighed. “At least let me change and brush my hair, first.” She shrugged Bob’s hands away and gave her guests an apologetic smile. “Just give me five minutes. Thank you, boys,” she waved at Jonathan and Will. “And nice to see you, Karen, Rita and Maureen,” she added to the matriarchs of the Wheeler, Henderson and Sinclair families, respectively. 

 

When she emerged from her bedroom, there was a new guest; Jim Hopper stood nervously in the middle of the living room, in full uniform, his hat in his hands. Joyce did a frantic sweep around the room to make sure Jonathan and Will were accounted for before she realized he was there for the party. 

 

“Hop!” she crossed the room to give him a hug. He smelled clean and Hopper-ish; Irish Spring soap, cigarette smoke and Big Red gum.

 

“Happy birthday, Joycie. Sorry I missed the big surprise,” he apologized, returning the hug.

 

“Your loud mouth would’ve given me a heart attack.” She tried to quell the warm feeling that radiated from her stomach when his arms tightened around her at the jibe - tried to ignore the way the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end at the sound and feel of his rich chuckle as it reverberated against her body. 

 

“Hey, you made it!” Bob’s cheerful greeting served as a reminder, and Joyce pulled away from Jim with an awkward clearing of her throat. 

 

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Jim replied, never tearing his eyes away from Joyce.

 

“Well, now we're all here, we should probably roll out the presents,” Jonathan announced, moving forward to give Jim a clap on the shoulder. “Hey, Chief.”

 

“Hey, Kid. I might actually need some help unloading your mom's gift from the back of the truck.”

 

Joyce scoffed and rolled her eyes. “I hope you're joking.”

 

“Nope. Come on, boys.”

 

Joyce gave Bob a confused look, and he shrugged, mouthing ‘I don't know’ as he followed Jonathan, Will and Jim through the front door. 

 

“Sit down and have someone fix you a drink, Joyce,” Jim called from the door.

 

“I wonder what it is,” Karen mused as she led Joyce to the couch.

 

“I have no idea,” Joyce moaned, covering her face with her hands. “I wish you all had just saved yourself the fuss.”

 

“Nonsense,” Maureen scoffed, pushing a drink into Joyce’s hands. 

 

After a few minutes of polite conversation broken up by the occasional sharp curse from the driveway, Jim popped his head through the front door. “Close your eyes, Birthday Girl.”

 

“Honestly.” Joyce did as she was asked, nonetheless. 

 

______

 

Jim had prepared himself for all manner of reaction, save for tears, which Joyce promptly burst into when she recognized the piano. 

 

“Joycie…” Jim  mumbled helplessly as her choked sobs filled the room. Bob was at her side in a moment, pulling her into an embrace that she broke away from when she leapt to her feet and threw herself into Jim’s arms. His heavy limbs dangled uselessly at his side for a long moment before he returned her embrace and murmured sentimental nonsense in front of an astonished audience. 

 

“Is it really mine?” Joyce asked when she pulled away. Her voice was small and tight, sounding all the world like a lost little girl. Jim would have given her the world in that moment, absolutely anything her heart desired, even if that desire was for him to light himself on fire.

 

“It’s yours, and it’s yours. I checked before I picked it up at a police auction a month ago. It was a little worse for the wear, but I cleaned it up and tuned it just like Dad taught me. I’m a little out of practice when it comes to that stuff, but it sounds nice.”

 

“I can’t believe you found it,” Jonathan marveled, running his hand along the polished wooden bench. “I remember this piano.”

 

“I don’t,” Will commented with a frown as he scrutinized the gold-leaf inlay. 

 

“You weren’t even born when Lonnie hocked it, that’s probably why,” Jonathan replied, opening the bench. “Hey, there’s a ton of sheet music in here.”

 

Jim moved to the piano’s temporary place in the middle on the living room and gave Jonathan a sheepish grin. “A lot of that actually came with the piano. Some of it has your mom’s name written on it, some of it I picked up here and there…”

 

Bob cleared his throat and stood. “Well, damn Hop, no one is going to be able to top this. Sweetheart, did you want to open the other gifts before…” he trailed off when Joyce headed towards the bench and shuffled through the selection. “... you tickle the ivories,” he finished quietly. Jim noted a definite look of defeat on the shorter man’s round features. 

 

“Ah,” Joyce murmured, pulling several sheets from the bench. “This is perfect.” She stood and graced Jim with a shy, beautiful smile. “It’s probably going to sound terrible when I try, but it reminds me of you.”

 

Jim squinted at the title of the music and snorted. “ _ Don Quixote. _ I remember you helping me with that book report in High School. Thanks, I guess.”

 

Joyce rolled her eyes and sat at the bench, arranging the music across the rack. She started with a few scales, allowing her fingers to readjust to the activity before letting them fly across the keys, playing a melody that started out cheerful, but became sweetly morose. Jim moved to one side so he could watch Joyce’s expression change with the music. Her face had always mirrored the music she was playing, had done since she was a little girl; rapturous during the romantic pieces, mischievous and smiling for the more upbeat selections, and stricken when tripping across the tragedies. 

 

If she made a mistake during her rendition of the “Pas de Deux Suite”, Jim didn’t notice. His eyes were not on her hands, nor were his ears trained to detect fudged chords or irregular rhythms… all that existed was Joyce and the myriad of expressions on her beautiful face, the way her eyes occasionally lifted to meet his, filling the room and the world with unspoken possibility.  

 

Something was stirring, something potentially dangerous, considering the eyes watching Joyce and Jim watch each other. 


End file.
